Leopoldas Laurinovich Surgailis

Mjesto: Utena

Rođen: 1928

Smrt: 2016

Biografija:

Leopoldas Surgailis is a classic of modernism in Lithuanian painting. His paintings cannot be confused with the works by any other artists, and their rich boisterous characters are easily recognisable in the context of Lithuanian painting of the second half of the 20th century. Although well known in Lithuania, Surgailis remained unfamiliar elsewhere. Both the nature of his work, which was far removed from the requirements raised to Soviet art, and the artist’s choice to avoid publicity were to blame for that. This book is aimed at reconstructing the artist’s creative path, at tracing the shifts in his painting, themes, and his style, as well as the times and places of displays of his paintings and their reception. Surgailis’s immense creative legacy consists of paintings shown in exhibitions, the variants of these paintings that have not been shown, a multitude of drawings in colour, and sketches. The most captivating and free-spirited works in his legacy are those that have not been shown in exhibitions and they are introduced in this album for the first time. This book sheds light on the artist’s complex and contradictory situation during the Soviet era, his efforts to stay in the public field of art and at the same time to keep a distance, which ended in his distancing and withdrawing to his own world of painting. The story of Surgailis’s work is a story of adaptation and non-adaptation, of official appreciation, of the ignoring silence, and liberation. He experienced these changes in his long career that lasted from the early 1950s to the second decade of the 21st century.The artist was working in a totalitarian environment that w...